


The Three R's

by SegaBarrett



Category: Clueless (1995)
Genre: Driver's Test, F/M, Fluffy, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27163759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Cher works on one thing at a time.
Relationships: Cher Horowitz/Josh Lucas
Comments: 14
Kudos: 42
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	The Three R's

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GotTheSilver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GotTheSilver/gifts).



> A/N: I don't own Clueless, and I make no money from this.
> 
> TW: Brief incest joke and brief suicide joke.

The last year had been, like, super hard for Cher Horowitz.

But now it was looking up. This must have been what Romeo and Juliet felt like, even though they decided to go die and be all depressing about it and all that kind of weird dark stuff. 

When Cher looked at Josh, she didn’t feel all Juliet-y, and she didn’t want to go close herself in a tomb. Which was good, considering that she had paid full price for this outfit and to must it up in some dingy coffin would be a tragedy in and of itself.

Instead, when she looked at Josh, she felt kinda bubbly and giddy, like there was a sale on something. But not on something tangible, on something that wouldn’t go away for a long, long time.

Like there was a sale on happiness.

She tried not to think about what would happen next, because that made her anxious, and being too anxious might give her frown-lines or something and it was just better not to risk it. Also, if she had learned anything in the past year, it was that trying to figure out what the future might hold was usually impossible.

She had to tell her father, which was kind of totally Middle-Ages because it wasn’t really any of his business, but she figured he ought to know that when he had Josh over he was also having her boyfriend over, which was a weird thing to think about.

***

“Listen, Dad, if I tell you something, you promise you won’t react like it’s totes _Flowers in the Attic_ or something?”

Mel turned his head and blinked at her.

“If I had any idea what you’re talking about, I could give you an answer to that, but to be honest, I don’t.”

“If I… were to, like, date Josh, would that lead to his body being in the basement? Or my body being in the basement? … Do we even technically have a basement, since there’s a couch and a TV down there, or is it, like, kind of more of a den type of situation?”

Mel blinked at her.

“You’re dating Josh, is what I got from that conversation.”

“I mean… Yes. I think.”

He wheeled around in his chair.

“Cher, that might have been the smartest decision I have ever seen you make.”

Cher cocked her head to the side.

“The smartest, though? Because I think donating the ski equipment was one of my better ones…”

“Learn to take the W, Cher. But…. Don’t break his heart, okay? And he better not break yours, either.”

“Or… body in the basement?”

“It really is more of a den, now that I consider it.”

***

“All right, turn here, and then, okay, not so fast, okay – not so fast. Turn here, turn here…”

Cher looked over at Josh in exasperation.

“I am turning, okay! Like, I was just about to turn.”

“You nearly hit the curb,” Josh pointed out, his voice more serene than it probably should have been. 

“No I didn’t,” Cher replied.

“Yes you did,” Josh replied, “You nearly…” He was cut off by Cher making another narrow left around another nearly-side-swiped curb. “Listen, Cher, you just need to try and take a deep breath and try to be calm… It’s a slow, careful art. You can’t just go around like Speed Racer.”

“What if I just like… don’t learn to drive ever and just hire, like, a chauffeur or something?”

“I mean, that is an option. But considering you already have both the permit and the car, the easiest way from point A to point B…”

“Is to learn to drive. Yeah, I know. I just… You know that Tai told me I was a virgin who couldn’t drive? How mean is that?”

“Didn’t you go to the mall with Tai like two days ago?” Josh inquired.

“That’s so not the point, Josh.”

“I’m just trying to keep up. What does it matter what she said to you when she was mad? She was just poking at you. You either have to forgive her, or not. Otherwise you’ll be chewing on it in the nursing home and no one will know who Tai is and I don’t know, bring you some Pad Thai because they think that’s what you want.”

“Ooh, I really could go for some Pad Thai,” Cher mused for a moment. “But I have to learn how to drive first.” She slammed her hand on the horn in frustration, and someone on the road honked back. “I’m never going to learn how to drive! I am hopeless. I should be like Juliet and just, like, poison myself.”

“Or you could just keep practicing,” Josh suggested, “You get yourself frazzled before you even start. That’s called ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. It means you do it a little bit to yourself.”

“As if,” Cher said with a snort, but she put the car back into drive.

***

As Josh had alluded to, Cher quickly became friends with Tai again, and Dionne was by her side as always. It was a little harder now that her status as queen bee had been threatened, but it was also exhausting to have to come up with plans about everything all of the time. If she had wanted to do that, she could have like, become a senator or something, and as far as she knew all of them had gray hair.

Junior prom was coming up, and that was a whole new thing to worry about. Maybe she should be thinking about that more than driving, considering anyone who was anyone showed up in a limo to prom and no one had to drive their own limo anywhere.

She would go with Josh, of course. Right? What if he thought he was too… adult to go to a silly old junior prom? Then there was no way that Cher could just go on her own looking like a sad loser. That would be totally, like, Sylvia Plath or something.

She decided not to ask him, and decided to drop hints instead. In retrospect, maybe they were very obvious hints. She started talking about the prom all the time.

She rented movies for them to watch that had proms in them, all the John Hughes movies for one, though maybe adding in _Carrie_ had been an ill-informed choice.

He didn’t seem to be getting the hint, though, and she was feeling like she was about to totally despair, give up and just abandon ship. 

Even Carrie hadn’t had this much trouble getting a date to the prom. 

***

When Cher parallel parked correctly for the first time, it was like some sort of out-of-body experience. Glide to the front of the cone, then the three R’s (hey, she thought to herself, that was like a life affirmation too – relationship, relocation, and, uh, really expensive car), even out the wheel, and then slide it all the way to the left.

She heard the words in Josh’s voice, the way he had said them as if it was all just as easy as pie. And maybe it was to him – he had a mind for stuff like that.

But he also liked to tell Cher that she had a “strategic mind”, whatever that meant exactly. 

Josh stared at her as if he had never seen her with his own eyes before, and she didn’t tell him that she had been thinking in his voice even when he wasn’t speaking, because that was honestly the kind of thing that seemed super creepy and would probably lead to him wondering if she was going to go “Hello, Clarice” the next time she saw him. 

“I did it!” she said, clapping her hands together.

“Well, that’s parallel parking,” he agreed, “Now, can you do it… five or six more times?”

“That’s not any fun,” Cher replied, but she put on her left turn signal, looked over her shoulder, and turned her wheel all the way to the left to begin again.

***

When they handed her the license, with her smiling face plastered on the plastic – not her best look, Cher admitted, but that wasn’t really the point (she would try to only hand it to police officers in low light), Cher felt like she was going to cry, or maybe cheer, or maybe just fall over and die from excitement.

She threw herself into Josh’s arms with such gusto that he nearly fell over, too. 

“You did it!” Josh exclaimed. “I knew that you could.”

She pressed her lips to his, wishing she could say that she knew she could, too. Everything had been so dizzy recently that maybe waiting for things to fall into place wasn’t the right strategy at all. Maybe she had to like, grab the bull by horns and hope it didn’t, like, gore her and spread her all around the ring in Spain, which was a super gross image that she was not going to follow any further.

“So, uh, Josh. Did you want to go to, um, like, junior prom? Like, with me, if that wasn’t obvious?”

She felt like there was a super-long pause, like centuries pause, like Rome was built and burnt down and the guy was playing a fiddle during the pause.

And then Josh said, “Yeah. Sure. Is there something you want me to wear?”

Cher only paused long enough in kissing him all over again to say, “Um, totally! There definitely is. I’ll show you.”

And then, of course, they would live happily ever after.


End file.
